6-year partnership, 100% strike rate – I-PAC, Pratik Jain in the eye of a political storm

KOLKATA: It was a July afternoon back in 2019 when CM Mamata Banerjee had a 2-hour meeting with poll strategist Prasant Kishor, the then I-PAC face, and party MP Abhishek Banerjee.

Pushed to the backfoot after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by a resurgent BJP, Banerjee was to face the all-crucial 2021 assembly elections. The meeting culminated in a six-and-a-half-year-old association in which Trinamool had a 100% strike rate. The party not only swept the 2021 assembly polls, it won the 2023 panchayat, and finally the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

According to party insiders, what I-PAC brought to the table for Trinamool was tech, data mining and field research. "Back in 2019, incumbency was the problem. With I-PAC, this turned into an opportunity. A ‘Didi Ke Bolo' programme was started, which on the face of it was a grievance redressal programme. But what it did was help map the core grudges. The data mining and research led to CM Banerjee launching the ‘Lakshmir Bhandar' scheme, and ‘Duare Sarkar'. Both helped Trinamool script a turnaround, routing BJP," a senior party functionary said.

But what started with a flourish in 2019 seemed to hit a roadblock after the 2021 polls. Kishor stepped away after the 2021 assembly polls, charting his own political path in Bihar. I-PAC, however, kept its association with Trinamool. With Kishor away, Pratik Jain, also an I-PAC co-founder and IIT Bombay graduate, stepped in to take a larger role in Bengal. For Trinamool, Jain was everything that Kishor was, with a plus.

"Unlike Kishor, Jain always prefers to stay away from the limelight. A brilliant mind, he works best in the shadows. In addition, he has his roots in Kolkata and understands Bengal's geopolitics better than most," a Trinamool neta said, effusive in Jain's praise.


In the post-Kishor poll script in Bengal, Jain's first big poll test was the 2024 LS election. A senior functionary said, "After the poll results were announced, Jain was called to pose for a photograph with the CM along with his team. His discomfiture at being clicked was apparent in the photograph that was published in the media the next day." But in the topsy-turvy world of politics, for I-PAC and Jain, Bengal's poll successes with Trinamool were immediately followed by a poll drubbing in Delhi with AAP in 2025. Worst, even the sitting Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal lost.

This year, I-PAC's role broadened. The opposition loss in 2025 polls, according to insiders, was identified as large-scale voter deletion. "In some cases it was found that BLAs, who can challenge any suspicious voter deletion and seek inclusion, were ignored, or not even appointed. The political parties seemingly did not have a list of their BLAs. Even much ahead of the SIR rollout in Bengal in Nov, Trinamool readied its BLA list, updated its ‘Didir Doot' app to capture the data BLAs provided during the SIR. I-PAC — and Jain — was integral to this planning. The party was SIR-ready even before it started in Bengal," a neta said. "Now with I-PAC, it isn't only about media outreach. It has become integral to help the party leadership plan its strategies. And Jain enjoys the leadership's complete trust," he said.